Of all the solutions for a warming world, “plant more trees” seems pretty obvious.
However, in New Zealand, which tested that premise by linking incentives for forestry development with its emissions trading scheme, the results have been more controversial and less effective than climate advocates hoped.
Now, after four years of frenetic planting, a prominent government watchdog has joined international agencies, industry groups and environmental advocates in calling for a radical overhaul, one that threatens a reversal of fortunes for investors in the recent forestry boom.
Illustration: Mountain People
“Pine production and permanent forestry are legitimate land uses,” New Zealand Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment Simon Upton wrote in a report on land-use change, published on Wednesday last week in Wellington.
“But afforestation should not be incentivised by treating it as a cheap way to offset fossil fuel emissions,” Upton said.
It is an aggressive challenge to one of the world’s most prominent campaigns for afforestation.
Ingka Group, the largest global IKEA franchisee and a major investor in New Zealand forestry, said in an e-mail that Upton’s advice is “significant, and we are closely reviewing the potential impacts,” adding that its long-term commitments in the country are unchanged.
Other forestry investors say the ongoing debates are sapping confidence in the market.
“While uncertainty remains, New Zealand is missing a significant opportunity to grow its forest estate,” said Phil Taylor, managing director of New Zealand forestry at Port Blakely, which owns 35,000 hectares of mixed species plantations.
“It needs to be sorted out,” Taylor added.
Since 2019, the country has added about 175,000 hectares of forests, almost all the fast-growing, carbon-sucking Pinus radiata, helping New Zealand make progress toward its 2050 net zero goal.
However, the new growth has subsumed the nation’s farmland, undermining the meat-and-dairy industry, the beef-and-sheep lobby said.
Increased waste from forestry — the logs, leaves and branches known as “slash” — more than doubled the damage of the flooding caused by last year’s Cyclone Gabrielle.
While those might be worthwhile trade-offs for significant long-term reductions in climate-warming carbon dioxide, the system does not really achieve that either, experts say.
Forests do absorb a lot of carbon dioxide, but their efficiency wanes over time. To achieve the same environmental effect over decades, “you’re going to have to keep planting more and more forests,” said John Saunders, a senior researcher at Lincoln University’s agribusiness and economics research unit.
“That isn’t actually solving the problem,” Saunders added.
The seeds of New Zealand’s forestry boom were planted in 2019, when the country’s emissions trading scheme required companies to use only domestic measures to compensate for carbon dioxide. In practice, it prohibited firms from buying carbon offsets developed abroad to shrink their carbon footprint.
At the same time, the new rule amplified an existing, and unusual, feature of the policy. Companies doing business in New Zealand are allowed to offset 100 percent of their emissions with credits generated by domestic forest projects. Most countries limit the use of offsets to push more fundamental cuts to carbon dioxide emissions.
The combination made forestry more lucrative almost overnight — not only could trees be harvested for timber, they could also generate the carbon credits that are valuable to local firms. Investors, including Germany’s Munich Re and Japan’s Sumitomo Corp, bought land. Ingka Group has purchased 23 separate tracts for forestry, although it said that it does not generate or sell carbon credits.
The land grab created opportunities for New Zealand farmers as well, driving up the price of land. The 30-year net present value of land with production forestry and carbon credits is NZ$21,300 (US$13,074) per hectare, 144 percent more than the expected returns from sheep and beef, said Julian Ashby, chief insight officer at the industry group Beef + Lamb New Zealand.
“The enormous additional returns from carbon means that foresters have been able to offer significantly more for land,” Ashby said.
Since early 2021, the nation’s foreign investment regulator has approved about 150 applications to buy more than 102,000 hectares of land for forestry, roughly two-thirds of which used to be farmland. The farm lobby has long been a vocal critic of the aggressive afforestation policy, calling it a threat to the beef, dairy, wool and mutton that make up about 46 percent of the nation’s annual exports.
“The government wanted more trees. The price of land went up so much and farmers couldn’t compete,” said Murray Hellewell, who raises sheep and beef on a 640 hectare farm on the South Island.
One by one, his neighbors have sold to forestry companies, nearly surrounding Hellewell’s farm with pines.
Forest owners, for their part, said the farmers’ criticisms are short-sighted and that adverse policy changes could affect the NZ$5 billion in annual forestry exports, also a key contributor to the country’s GDP.
Investors need confidence in the emissions trading scheme, said Elizabeth Heeg, head of the New Zealand Forest Owners Association, adding that diminishing the role of forestry offsets would not be good for the country’s climate targets.
“It makes no sense for the report to suggest that reducing production forestry is a positive way forward,” she said in a statement.
The new government has said it is looking at revisions to the emissions trading scheme to restrict productive farmland being converted to forestry, although New Zealand Minister for Climate Change Simon Watts in an e-mail said that limiting forestry credits is not on the table.
“We do recognize the concerns over the scale and pace of rural land use change, and the need to balance productive land uses,” he said.
Upton’s report offered one solution that could meet the needs of at least some farmers and environmentalists alike. One problem with the current forestry credits is that they are used to offset carbon dioxide emissions, typically from fossil fuels, which linger in the atmosphere in perpetuity — which means the forest also has to live forever, against the odds of disease, fire, storm or human behavior.
However, biogenic methane, the greenhouse gas emitted by livestock, has a greater warming effect, but for a shorter period of time. Starting in 2030, farmers would have to pay for those emissions or find a way to offset them.
Forestry could be a solution, Upton said.
“For short-lived gases like methane, the goal is to reduce emissions to an acceptable flow rather than eliminate them altogether,” he wrote.
Using forests to offset methane emissions “is a more justifiable strategy than using it to offset fossil carbon dioxide,” he added.
US President Donald Trump’s second administration has gotten off to a fast start with a blizzard of initiatives focused on domestic commitments made during his campaign. His tariff-based approach to re-ordering global trade in a manner more favorable to the United States appears to be in its infancy, but the significant scale and scope are undeniable. That said, while China looms largest on the list of national security challenges, to date we have heard little from the administration, bar the 10 percent tariffs directed at China, on specific priorities vis-a-vis China. The Congressional hearings for President Trump’s cabinet have, so far,
US political scientist Francis Fukuyama, during an interview with the UK’s Times Radio, reacted to US President Donald Trump’s overturning of decades of US foreign policy by saying that “the chance for serious instability is very great.” That is something of an understatement. Fukuyama said that Trump’s apparent moves to expand US territory and that he “seems to be actively siding with” authoritarian states is concerning, not just for Europe, but also for Taiwan. He said that “if I were China I would see this as a golden opportunity” to annex Taiwan, and that every European country needs to think
For years, the use of insecure smart home appliances and other Internet-connected devices has resulted in personal data leaks. Many smart devices require users’ location, contact details or access to cameras and microphones to set up, which expose people’s personal information, but are unnecessary to use the product. As a result, data breaches and security incidents continue to emerge worldwide through smartphone apps, smart speakers, TVs, air fryers and robot vacuums. Last week, another major data breach was added to the list: Mars Hydro, a Chinese company that makes Internet of Things (IoT) devices such as LED grow lights and the
US President Donald Trump is an extremely stable genius. Within his first month of presidency, he proposed to annex Canada and take military action to control the Panama Canal, renamed the Gulf of Mexico, called Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy a dictator and blamed him for the Russian invasion. He has managed to offend many leaders on the planet Earth at warp speed. Demanding that Europe step up its own defense, the Trump administration has threatened to pull US troops from the continent. Accusing Taiwan of stealing the US’ semiconductor business, it intends to impose heavy tariffs on integrated circuit chips
RSS